This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Bosnia and Herzegovina: Why has Canada ‘dropped the ball’ on landmine removal effort?

Canada was a leader in the move to rid the world of landmines, which kill and maim the innocent. But not anymore.

Bosnian men carry the coffin of 6-year-old Tarik Bijelic during his funeral in the village of Olovske Luke, north of Sarajevo, Bosnia. Tarik was hit by a landmine as he scavenged in the forest for firewood. (Amel Emric / AP)

Bosnia remains plagued by landmines after a war that killed 200,000 of its citizens, nearly 5 per cent of the overall population, between 1992 and 1995. Now, the capital city Sarajevo is a city of graveyards. (Rick Westhead / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Branislav Todorovich works at a cafe in Ustipraca, Bosnia. The hills and valleys around the town are beguiling but are covered in landmines. (Rick Westhead / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Many of the main highways through Bosnia remain marked by red signs warning of minefields. (Rick Westhead / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Davor Koprivica, 60, a Bosnian deminer, says the work of removing mines is slow and deliberate. (Rick Westhead / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Fehima Busevac, right, and Bakir Bijelic, the aunt and brother of 6-year-old Tarik Bijelic cry on the doorstep of their small house in the village of Olovske Luke. (Amel Emric / AP)

USTIPRACA, BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA—This picture-perfect village in eastern Bosnia has a lake filled with trout and rolling hills crowded with spruce and oak, orchards with plum, peach and pear trees.

It would be a tourist’s dream, if not for the landmines.

“The firefighters couldn’t reach a fire in the forest last year because of mines,” says waiter Branislav Todorovich, 58. “You could hear them exploding as the fire reached them. They are still all over.”

Almost 20 years after the end of the Balkans war, Bosnia, one of Europe’s poorest nations, remains plagued by landmines. Roughly 1,340 square kilometres of the battered country — nearly 3 per cent of its land mass — are still peppered with mines.

For years, countries such as Bosnia could rely on Canada for financial support to clear landmines and help their victims.

Article Continued Below

In 1997, the Canadian government helped spearhead what became known as the Ottawa Treaty, an agreement signed by 125 countries to end the production of landmines, clear the ones that had already been laid and destroy all stockpiles.

The treaty was a watershed. While countries had long recognized the damage caused by landmines — Canada started destroying its stock of 30,000 in 1996 — the number of landmine casualties continued to climb. In Belgium, they were still digging up 80 mines a day — mines that had been laid during World War I.

Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s foreign affairs minister at the time, called the treaty “this generation’s pledge to the future and a bridge to the millennium.” The International Committee to Ban Landmines won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

It helped that the cause had the support of Diana, Princess of Wales, who travelled to the landmine-laced countries of Angola, Pakistan and Bosnia.

But 15 years later, Canada appears to be abandoning the cause. Landmine experts and current and former diplomats say Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is telling demining groups that landmine removal is too closely associated with past Liberal governments.

“The Conservatives like to say, ‘It’s not us,’” says Gerry Barr, former executive director of the Canadian Council for Independent Cooperation, an umbrella group of aid agencies. “It means they haven’t built that brand. Someone else has. The Liberals did. So why would they support it?”

In 2010, at least 13 countries, including Afghanistan, Angola, Iraq and Zimbabwe, had at least 100 square kilometres of suspected or confirmed minefields, according to the Landmine Monitor, a report published by the International Committee to Ban Landmines.

There were 4,191 landmine casualties in 2010, the report said, and at least 39 countries with collective stockpiles of 160 million unplanted mines.

The Canadian government will award about $16.9 million to demining-related efforts this year, down from $33 million in 2011 and from the high-water mark of $49.2 million in 2007. This year’s total will be the lowest in more than a decade, according to preliminary statistics provided by Mine Action Canada.

Next year’s Canadian funding is expected to decrease even more.

“The landmine file has been butchered over politics and it’s tragic,” says Rahul Singh, the founder of the Toronto-based non-profit Global Medic, which trains medics to work with landmine clearance experts. “No one can build a school in a field of landmines. Farmers won’t till the land. Do you think Walmart will come and open stores? Canada is the pillar of this movement. Nothing is more Canadian than this. We should be doing it.”

Canadian Kerry Brinkert, director of a UN-funded unit in Geneva that is in charge of ensuring the anti-personnel mine ban is observed, says the job of clearing mines on a global level is “about 40 to 50 per cent done.”

“Canada has dropped the ball and walked away, leaving the job unfinished,” says Dan Livermore, formerly Canada’s special ambassador on mine action. (The diplomatic position was eliminated in 1996 by the Jean Chrétien Liberal government.) “Maybe others like Australia will pick up the slack for us, maybe they won’t.”

But a spokesperson with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade said Canada continues to play a “leading role internationally in addressing the humanitarian impact and explosive remnants of war.

“Since 2006, Canada has contributed more than $200 million through 250 projects to this global effort, making it one of the world’s top contributors,” Jean-Bruno Villeneuve wrote in an email. “Canada remains deeply committed to this cause and continues to evaluate possible mine action projects that will deliver tangible results.”

Ian Trites, a Foreign Affairs spokesperson, refused to provide details of the 250 projects and declined to explain why Canadian funding dropped this year.

“The response we provided yesterday was the department’s response on this,” Trites wrote in an email, referring to Villeneuve’s response.

In one instance, a Confederate officer ordered his troops to bury four artillery shells on a road outside Richmond. When the Union cavalry advanced, the shells exploded as the horses’ hooves struck them.

“These four shells checkmated the advance of 115,000 men and turned them from their line of march,” said a Confederate lawyer cited in the book Confederate Torpedoes, written by Gabriel Rains.

Some officers denounced their use. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman called them a “violation of civilized warfare.”

Landmines might not have been civilized but they were brutally effective and became a popular weapon.

During a 12-year civil war that ended in 1991, landmines blanketed Cambodia. They were used by all four factions: the Soviet-supported Phnom Penh government, the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge and two non-Communist groups with U.S. backing, including the Khmer People’s Front. Cambodia marked the first war in which mines were said to have claimed more victims than any other weapon. In the years immediately after the war, Cambodia reportedly had the world’s highest percentage of disabled people: one in 236 Cambodians had lost a limb.

About 650 square kilometres in Cambodia still requires clearing, the International Committee to Ban Landmines said in October. As many as 7 million mines may have been laid in the country.

Months after the Cambodian conflict ended, Bosnia flared into violence. During three years of fighting, an estimated 2 million mines were laid.

In Afghanistan, 10 million mines were planted. Another 35 million are believed to have been planted but are now missing, either because they have been cleared, exploded or moved, perhaps in flooding. Most mines were laid during a decade of resistance following the Soviet invasion in 1979, during a 1992-1996 civil war, and after the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

Other countries with more than 1 million mines included Egypt, Iran, Mozambique, Somalia and the Western Sahara.

In 1997, the UN put the cost of clearing the world’s mines at $58 billion.

Mere weeks after a young African girl was killed by a landmine that had been laid in 1942 by Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, the Ottawa Treaty was signed.

The days leading up to the signing were dramatic as some large countries waffled. France, Germany and the U.K. agreed only at the last minute, giving the treaty much-needed legitimacy since the U.S., Russia and China all refused to sign. (The U.S. argued signing the treaty would endanger 37,000 troops in Korea; if it removed the 1 million landmines it had there the 900,000 North Korean soldiers massed on the border could reach Seoul.)

The Ottawa Treaty was described as a “victory for humanity” and gave a boost to a country that had lost its influence on the world stage. The “niche diplomacy” did as much to boost Canada’s profile as the Middle East peace initiative known as “the Oslo Accords” did for Norway.

In 1997, Canada opened the Canadian Landmine Fund and promised to contribute $100 million over five years, distributed to both Canadian and international non-profits. Five years later, the fund was extended for five years with $85 million in funding.

In 2007, a year after the Conservatives formed a minority government, the landmine fund was closed. The government pledged to continue supporting landmine efforts through the Canadian International Development Agency and contributions to the United Nations Mine Action Centre.

But slowly and quietly the funding was pared.

What money has been spent in demining has largely been funneled to projects in Afghanistan. In 2010, for example, 62 per cent of Canada’s $31-million landmine spending went to Afghan-related projects, according to the International Committee to Ban Landmines.

On June 6, the U.K.-based non-profit Halo Trust was informed that its request to the Department of Foreign Affairs for a renewal of funding for mine clearing in Afghanistan, a three-year project that employs 226, had been refused.

“The people (at Foreign Affairs) were in tears when they told us and said they weren’t allowed to tell us why,” says Tim Porter, Halo’s Central Asia desk officer. “We’re going to request justification from the minister’s office.”

Critics say the cutback provides a window into current Canadian foreign policy.

Increasingly, Canada is spending less money on foreign affairs and development aid issues such as landmines and is becoming more parochial. Canada, several critics and diplomats say, is slipping from the public eye.

Over the next three years, Foreign Affairs is cutting $170 million from its reported operating budget of about $1.4 billion, the Ottawa-based trade publication Embassy magazine reported in July.

The news came in the wake of revelations that Canada plans to close five U.S. missions, phase out a program that funded Canadian studies at universities abroad, sell 22 of the department’s most valuable paintings and raise $80 million by selling 40 of its official residences abroad.

“We criticize the U.S. a lot, but when a leadership role is thrust on them, they follow through with it and stick it out, regardless of a change in government,” says Paul Hannon, executive director of Mine Action Canada, a lobbying group. “We should do the same.”

It’s understandable for some critics to say Canada’s funding of landmine action has gone on long enough, says Amir Mujanovic, executive director of the Landmine Survivors Initiatives, an advocacy group in Tuzla, Bosnia.

“We know Canada has played a big role,” Mujanovic says. “You’re not a big country. But you have spent a lot of money on this. It’s become a Canadian thing.”

The forest is full of valuable mushrooms and herbs, says Todorovich, the waiter.

“And deer,” he adds. “Every now and again, you hear one of them blow up after they’ve stepped on a mine.”

In 2010, a local man alerted police after discovering a landmine near Ustipraca’s main thoroughfare. As three workers roped off the area, one stepped on another mine. All three were killed.

“Go for a walk in the woods here?” says Todorovich. “Out of the question.”

Less than a kilometre from where Todorovich serves strong Turkish coffees, Davor Koprivica crouches on his knees and slowly slides a metal poker — it looks like a barbecue lighter — into the loose dirt and rocks.

Koprivica pushes the poker about 20 centimetres into the ground at a 30-degree angle to see if it clinks against a landmine.

In one month recently, Koprivica discovered 400 landmines in a single field. Some were small mines called PMA-2. Those, about the size of a can of tuna, had 100 grams of hexogen, a compact synthetic explosive. They were designed to blow the leg off a soldier, “so at least two other soldiers would have to help take the injured soldier away,” Koprivica says.

Others were PROM-1, or “jumper mines,” which carried 400 grams of explosive. When they were stepped on, they popped chest high into the air before blowing up. Those mines had a kill zone of 200 metres and could kill dozens at a time.

Koprivica, 60, a former maintenance worker at a Volkswagen plant, is the leader of a team clearing a former railway line that runs through Ustipraca.

During the Balkan War, the railway formed a dividing line between Bosnian Muslims and Serbian troops. Both sides laid mines for defence.

Mine clearance is grim, taxing work.

“What’s your blood type?” is the first question visitors at the minefield are asked. “A doctor doesn’t need to know your name if you have a leg blown off.”

Koprivica says his workers can do five hours of demining per day at most because the work is so nerve-wracking. Poking the ground, they clear about five square metres every 30 minutes before taking a 10-minute break. The money is fair, by Bosnian standards. Koprivica earns 400 Bosnian marks ($253) per month.

“You have to be deliberate and slow,” says Koprivica, whose non-profit Stop Mines is funded by Handicap International. “The land you say is clear today is the land your colleagues are walking on tomorrow and children the day after. We don’t talk much while we work. You might hear someone sometimes singing or humming an old Bosnian song called ‘You Make One Wrong Move.’”

Sometimes Koprivica and his crew use metal detectors but often they are useless because the natural metals in the soil can set them off.

When Koprivica and his team find a mine, they place it in a hole and affix a small charge of high explosives. Running a cable 30 metres away, his team huddles behind trees and rocks and detonates the mine.

Carrying a face visor and wearing a blue anti-shrapnel vest that runs from his neck to his groin, Koprivica walks along the former rail line. Every few metres, he points to a spot where his team pulled a mine from the ground.

He and his partner walk single file, one walking in the other’s footprints, even though they have already cleared this stretch.

In two years, Koprivica says he will retire.

“Bosnia says it will have its landmines cleared by 2019 but we know that won’t happen,” he says. “There’s no money for it. We went six months this year without clearing a single mine because there were no funds. Bosnians will be dying from landmines long after I am dead.”

There’s no guarantee of safety even where the signs are absent.

“People have become complacent,” Koprivica says. “They take the danger signs before the mines are gone and sell them for scrap metal.”

According to Bosnia’s Mine Action Centre in Sarajevo, 1,674 people have been killed or injured by mines since the war ended in 1995.

During the past year alone, three railway workers died and three were injured when they triggered a landmine while walking in a wooded area believed to be safe. A Slovenian paraglider had both legs amputated last October after he landed in the middle of a minefield.

And on Aug. 10, Tarik Bijelic died after stumbling on to a landmine while collecting firewood near his rural home in central Bosnia. He was 6.

Bosnia’s largest trading partner, Croatia, is about to enter the European Union. When that happens, Bosnia’s food exports to its neighbour will be required to meet EU standards. That could cost Bosnia the loss of at least 22 million euros a year in exports of meat, eggs and dairy products, according to balkaninsight.com, a website that covers the region.

Bosnia still lacks a functioning national electricity grid and its per capita GDP is $4,618, one of the poorest in Europe. Neighbouring Croatia’s is $13,371, according to the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

This year, Bosnia budgeted $80 million for demining. Of that, $20 million came from international donors and $60 million was to come from tax revenue. But the government only provided $20 million.

Over the past five years, the government has come through with just 45 per cent of the money it promised for landmine action, said Tarik Sherak, head of operations with the Mine Action Centre, a branch of the Ministry of Civil Affairs. “We’re a very poor country.”

Bosnia has cleared about 10 square kilometres per year over the past four years, well short of the 25 it would need to meet its goal of eliminating landmines by 2019.

Bosnia did not send a single representative to a major mine conference in November in Cambodia because of the expense, says Mujanovic of the Landmine Survivors Initiatives.

“People kept coming up to me asking where our government people were,” Mujanovic says. “It’s understandable in some ways that Canada and other countries would not support us if we don’t even show up to advocate. I think 20 years after the war there’s a sense of complacency that has set in.”

Perhaps there’s also a sense of being overwhelmed.

The enormity of the destruction left by the war is hard to grasp. Sixty per cent of homes, half of all the schools and a third of hospitals were destroyed or damaged. Power plants and roads were battered and rivers contaminated with toxic waste from bombed industrial plants.

There is also the issue of corruption.

On Aug. 30, six non-profits met with prosecutors in Sarajevo to file a criminal complaint over allegations of kickbacks being demanded for the awarding of mine cleanup contracts. A spokesperson for Sarajevo’s prosecutors’ office declined to comment.

Sherak wasn’t surprised.

“I can’t say whether there has been any corruption or not,” he says. “Everybody talks about it. We don’t have any money to pay and when there’s no money, these companies say there’s corruption.”

Today, even as a sense of normalcy has returned to Sarajevo, the hills remain off limits.

“There are mines even there, many mines,” says Mitrevski, 52, a former Macedonian army major and explosives expert.

Mitrevski is the country director for the Canadian International Demining Corps. From 2000 to 2004, the Canadian non-profit trained more than 100 explosives-detecting dogs for the Bosnian military.

“You start with a dog that’s maybe a year old and begin with obedience, and move on to sniffing explosives,” he says. “They get to be 100 per cent accurate.”

In 2004, Canadian Demining broadened its services and began hiring deminers, buying detection equipment, protective gear and a large 12-ton “flailer,” a $180,000 machine that thrashes the ground as it moves slowly ahead, blowing up landmines.

For three years, Mitrevski says the CIDC employed about 50 deminers and cleared a total of six square kilometres.

But in 2007, CIDC’s Canadian funding stopped.

“Canada has just given up on us,” Mitrevski said. “I know there are other areas like Afghanistan where Canada has interests but I think it’s a shame. Canada could be helping to save lives right now here, like the young boy who was killed a few weeks ago collecting firewood.

“Instead, Canada has just said, ‘We’ve done enough for you, you are on your own.’ And we are.”

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com